AI Enthusiasm

Chatbot companies want to have it both ways: personalization and emotion as a retention moat, but minimal responsibility for safeguarding the intimate relationships now running on their servers.

AI nerds, as opposed to conscious technologists and normal people, who know how to separate enthusiasm for discovery from devotion to the God of excess, seem to like things regardless of valence or value. What matters to them isn’t the quality of the outcome or the meaning—life-saving or soul-draining, uplifting or addicting, doesn’t matter—only... See more

Somehow we are too distrustful to talk to each other, and more than happy to confess to a sycophantic alien machine.

Human skeptics can kill a nascent idea, but ChatGPT was willing to entertain every far-fetched hypothesis.